Subscribe

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

My Thoughts On OS X 10.9 Mavericks... So Far

Wow. Wow wow wowee wow. Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks is here, and it is FREE to all Mac users. So, I will give you my thoughts on all that I have played with so far and see where that goes.

iBooks for Mac

FINALLY. iBooks is on the Mac! The store interface looks eerily like iTunes's, and it takes what was before just for iPhone and iPad to the Mac platform and I think it does it very well. Also, reading in iBooks is absolutely cool, so there’s that.

Maps

Well well well. I love Maps myself (and unlike the rest of the world I’ve had exactly zero trouble with it), but this is rather unique and awesome. It does have some dicey points-of-interest still (searching for a public library doesn’t do well, just saying), but overall it’s a fabulous application and it is now on the Mac with Mavericks!

Calendar with Travel Times built-in

This is truly an amazing feature. I can get an idea of when I can leave to get somewhere at a time certain and I cannot be happier about that!! For someone like me who has issues with judging timing, this is an absolute godsend and I cannot wait to use this more and more and more.

Overall Thoughts

I am actually really liking the fact that Apple finally got the inane memory requirements for the integrated graphics cards out of the way and I am no longer pegging the memory of my MacBook Pro with the apps I run on a day-to-day basis because they finally gave the integrated graphics chips dynamic memory (i.e. it won’t be such a blasted memory hog when you aren’t running graphics-intensive apps. FINALLY!!!). Now since I may very well be in the market for a new Mac sooner rather than later, I may actually consider buying a Mac laptop with the new Intel graphics chips now that Mavericks doesn’t give the integrated GPU so dang much memory! Which is awesome.

Also, I haven’t gotten to play that much with the new iLife and iWork apps yet so those will get their own blog post once I get to put them through their paces enough to write eloquently about the updates.